Facebook takes on HQ Trivia with live game shows

Facebook announced new interactive features for live and on-demand videos allowing content creators and publishers to create polls, quiz questions and challenges for individual videos or even a standalone game show.(Photo: Facebook/Handout)

It's official: Soon, you'll be able to play live game shows on Facebook.

Tapping into consumer demand that made HQ Trivia a hit,the company announced new interactive features for live and on-demand videos allowing content creators and publishers to create polls, quiz questions and challenges on individual videos or even a standalone game shows.

Using the polling features, which will be available on both on-demand and live video, creators can add questions with sets of answers to videos, get peoples' opinions, vote on issues, or play games like "Two Truths and a Lie." Gameplay features will be available for Facebook Live, where people can eliminate players from a game if they answer a question incorrectly.

People have flocked to the smartphone equivalent of live TV game shows popularized by HQ Trivia, with more than 1 million people tuning in at once to one of these contests.

Facebook's video on demand service, Facebook Watch, will be launching several live game shows in the next few weeks such as Business INSIDER's Confetti, where people can compete with their friends to win a cash prize, Buzzfeed News' Outside Your Bubble, where contestants have to guess what their opponents are thinking, and Fresno's What's in the Box, where viewers win prizes for guessing what's inside a closed box.

All of this is part of Facebook's push to fulfill CEO Mark Zuckerberg's mission to turn the social network into a "video-first" platform. The new features are the company's attempt to get people to interact with video rather than passively consume it, and to bolster connections between content creators and fans.